The Happiest Days of Our Lives

02/11/2009

SPECIAL NOTE: THIS AUDIO VERSION IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE, DUE TO LULU.COM ENDING THE SALE OF AUDIOBOOKS. I'M SEARCHING FOR ALTERNATIVE DISTRIBUTION.

You can buy the audio version of The Happiest Days of Our Lives right here, for just $19.72. "Why $19.72?" You ask? Because that's the year I was born, and since nobody else is the boss of me, I can do that sort of thing. "How long is it?" You say? "That's what she said!" I reply. Then I tell you that it's about three and a-half hours long, and we laugh and laugh before the episode ends with a hilarious freeze frame.

Unlike the audio version of Just A Geek, the audio performance of The Happiest Days of Our Lives will only be available as a download. We found that the costs associated with creating and shipping physical media for JAG:tA vastly outweighed the benefits, and most people just rip the CDs to their favorite digital format, anyway.

Now, I'm sure most of you reading this don't need to hear it, but I'm a dad, and that means I often say things at great length that don't need to be said, so I'd appreciate it if you pretended to listen. I've made it really clear that I despise DRM and think it's stupid, and I will never willingly infect something you buy from me with DRM. In accordance with my philosophy, there is no DRM or restriction of any kind on this audiobook. I don't think I'll lose any sales of The Happiest Days audiobook to piracy, because people who would steal from me aren't people who wouldn't buy it, anyway, but I need to say this. If you're considering trying to steal it in some way, there's very little I can do to stop you – it's a game of whack-a-mole that I don't have the time or resources to play – but I hope you'll consider that when you steal from me, you're not sticking it to a giant company with millions of dollars in annual revenue. When you steal from me, you're directly hurting my family, because this is how I support the four of us (and our dogs, who say that they love you no matter what, because they're dogs and that's what they do.)

Shortly after I published The Happiest Days of Our Lives
, Bill Schafer, who is the publisher and owner of Subterranean Press,
contacted me about doing a special limited edition. I discovered
Subterranean Press when they published John Scalzi's Questions for a Soldier, and I fell in love with their special editions when I got Charlie Stross' Missile Gap and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The idea of having my little book treated the same as books by John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, Ray Bradbury, and Neal Stephenson
was awesome, but I wasn't sure if it was a good idea - I didn't want to
put out yet another edition of a book people already owned, and I really didn't want to do something that would devalue the 300.

I talked it over with Anne, sought advice from my friend and editor
Andrew, and I asked some friends who have worked with Bill what they
thought (it turns out that everyone who works with him adores him,
which ended up being very important to me). After a few weeks of
consideration, I realized that this was a unique opportunity, and I
would be a fool to pass it up.

I got in touch with Bill and accepted his offer. We decided that
instead of just doing a different printing of a book people already
had, I'd look through the material that just missed the final cut, and
put together a special expanded edition. I would also take all those
pictures that are on the cover, and create a special photo insert
section. (I'm really excited about this; my idea is to create something
that looks and feels like a family photo album, complete with
handwritten captions.)

Limited: $35ISBN: 978-1-59606-244-3Lettered: $300

Length: 200 pages (tentative)

Readers of Wil
Wheaton’s website know that he is a masterful teller of elegant stories
about his life. Building on the critical success of Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, he has collected more of his own favorite stories in his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives.
These are the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest
to his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky
hobbies and values along to his own children, and vividly painting what
it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of
the video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

Within the pages of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, you will find:

“The Butterfly Tree”: how one Back to School night continues to shape Wil’s sense of social justice, thirty years later;

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek”: why fantasy
role-playing games are such an important part of Wil’s past – and his
present

“The Big Goodbye”: a visit to Paramount gives Wheaton a second chance to say farewell to Star Trek . . . properly, this time

“Let Go”: a moving eulogy for a beloved friend

In all of these tales,
Wheaton brings the reader into the raw heart of the story, holding
nothing back, and you are invited to join him on a journey through The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

“Wil Wheaton’s made a new
career out of doing well that which is in fact the hardest thing to do
at all: he writes, brilliantly and simply and gloriously, about joy.”
--Warren Ellis, author of Crooked Little Vein, Transmetropolitan, and Planetary

The Subterranean Press edition of The Happiest Days of Our Lives will be expanded from the version Wil released himself, to include additional essays, and a photo section.